Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Middle Climate trashed

George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, offers some metaphors about our President:

George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America's wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3,000.

His backers - among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America - are calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble.

If it is too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate - the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to flourish - makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. [...]

That rhetoric suggests that the buzzards are already circling around the Middle Climate--those Iraqis aren't coming back from the dead, after all. Later he concludes "Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we might have left it too late." He goes on, of course, to affirm that we must try, but I think he fails to appreciate that we are approaching a policy consensus. Global Warming skeptics don't feel we need to do anything. Global Warming true-believers have grave doubts that anything can be done. So let's not do anything. We'll still have a motivation to develop alternate energy sources just to keep the world's wealth out of the hands of the Saudis, and most of the envisioned alternate energy sources involve less carbon emissions anyway. So let's concentrate on the economy.